Her house was about to be destroyed, and she knew it. There was nothing she could do to save it. All her attention was immediately diverted to her kids.
Jennifer Hohmann and three of her children were at home, at 9 a.m. on Jan. 10. Her husband Steve was already away for the day, and their four other kids were thankfully not in the house on rural Higdon Road southwest of Quesnel. It was about -20 degrees outside, but flames and heat were gathering momentum inside. They had to flee.
“It went so fast. You always hear ‘it’s faster than you think’ and that’s so true. Really fast,” Jennifer told The Observer after the incident was over and she had been attended to at GR Baker Memorial Hospital for smoke inhalation.
“I remember thinking, if I try to go upstairs and save anything, if I slip on the stairs, there’s no way anyone could get to me in time. I knew they weren’t going to be able to save the house. They just couldn’t make it in time and I had to realize that was just how it is, and nothing could change that. It could have been so much worse. So much could have been different and make it a really sad story.”
The main twist of fate for the Hohmanns at home was the hour the fire broke out. They were awake and their day underway. Had they been asleep, perhaps they wouldn’t have detected the signs in time. Their fire alarm, which Jennifer said tends to go off when they make toast even if they don’t burn the bread, did not ring until it had reached the catastrophe stage.
“I already had the kids out of the house. When I heard it go off I actually said ‘oh, you’re showing up now?’ I was mouthing off to the fire alarm,” she said.
“It went really quick,” said Lance Wilkins, chief of the West Fraser Volunteer Fire Department (WFVFD). “It was fully involved when we got there. It was perhaps a chimney fire, but I couldn’t even tell where the chimney was when we first got there. The top of the house was just fully involved.”
With no hydrants or water sources like lakes or ponds in the vicinity, the WFVFD had to haul water in their tender (tanker truck), plus the tender brought to help by the Quesnel Fire Department. The Quesnel outfit supplied a couple of people to work in conjunction with WFVFD’s six firefighters.
“It’s really great when we get mutual aid like that,” said Wilkins. “That’s what keeps us going, especially with daytime fires when everybody is at work and it’s the hardest time for people to show up. This one was busy - everybody had a job to do with nobody to relieve you, really, but when people are at work, not all employers allow you to leave to do volunteer stuff, and there’s a lot of jobs where leaving can really cause problems, so not everybody can do it. Some can, some can’t. So it was really great having the help from Quesnel.”
The firefighters had some trouble getting the tenders up and down a slippery hill on the approach to the house, but there was little pressure to over-drive the conditions since all involved knew the house could not be saved, and the firefighting was merely to keep the flames from spreading.
“As soon as it started to burn I said to myself ‘I cannot feel sorry for myself,’ because all seven of my kids are safe and I’m not going to mourn the loss of stuff,” Jennifer said. “There are times when I’ve thought of things I wish I’d been able to grab, but I told my sons, even with the little we have, now, we are still way richer than so many others on the planet. I feel like we are being so well loved and looked after that I’m not having as hard a time as I would have thought beforehand.”
The community stepped up to help almost immediately. She was profusely thankful for the outpouring of clothing, household items, cash (there is a GoFundMe campaign already underway under the title Hohmann Family Fundraiser), and other contributions not the least of which was moral support when people’s minds have suffered a jolt even if they are outwardly understanding of it.
“Nothing else matters more than the people you’re surrounded by, the people who love you, those relationships,” she said. “That’s what’s most important. I already knew that, but you know, wow, now I really really know who’s got my back, and it’s amazing.”
One consequence of the incident remains to be closely monitored, she said. There was a brief period where the kids were out of the house and in front watching it burn, before the fire department arrived. Jennifer was a short ways behind. They couldn’t see her, and in that short period of time, their minds seized on her being caught inside. Although she was only moments out of view, the mental impact was made.
“We’re very very blessed and I’m hugging my kids so much. I want to really make sure they know they’re more important than anything.”
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